PunkAssBlog.com

Chris Jones of Esquire.com says people are boorish, rude and confrontational, a problem he could help solve if only it were still OK to punch people.

This whole thing started — or maybe it ended — with these guys engaging in some ritualistic, Hare Krishna clapping shit…I asked them politely to stop. “Make us,” they said, and then they clapped louder, smiling their dirty-toothed smiles at us, twisting our nipples. One of them was named Jericho, I picked up. He was a skinny bearded guy who looked as though he’d wear Guatemalan mittens in winter. “Jerry,” I said when they finally took a break, “come on over here, have a chat.” He did, and shortly thereafter, he loosed a throat pony into my face. It was Jerry’s bad luck that I had resolved to start punching people again.

“Throat pony”? “Guatemalan mittens”?

I’d reached the end of the road after what seemed like a perpetual assault from life’s Jerichos — the sorts of assholes who not only act like assholes but celebrate their assholedom

You mean like guys who read esquire?

How’d we get here? Blogs are part of it, along with the incessant frothing of TV pundits and reality-show contestants, especially that lippy midget from The Amazing Race:

Oh yeah, I’m feeling the class oozing off this guy. If someone has to be in charge of deciding who gets a punchin’, I’d vote for Chris.

And the saddest part is, the Jerichos are right to feel bulletproof. Somewhere along the way, we’ve evolved into a culture without consequence, taught so much hokum about the bigger man walking away.

At this point, Chris’s laughable attempt to rationalize his desire to administer beat-downs becomes the second saddest thing I’ve blogged this week, behind the Michigan Tech student who’s pissed all those vaginae are torching his class rank. It was even better on the MSN feed, where all the obscenities were ***-ed out. Dude, if you want to be the guy who throws punches in bars, be that guy, but own it. Don’t tell me you’re stepping in to do karma’s job and expect leniency from the law - no one said being a superhero was easy.

I like karma as much as the next guy, but lately, watching my city behave more and more like an Internet comments thread in the midst of a flame war, I’ve grown tired of waiting for the planets to balance the ledger…[Long, tortured hockey metaphor about enforcers] Too bad life changes when we take off our skates — constrained by fear of cops, by fear of lawyers, by fear of the wife, all of our judges. Not anymore. I would submit, Your Honor, that if someone is doing something demonstrably asinine, and I ask them to stop it, please, and they say, “Make us,” they’ve entered a binding oral contract whereby I am permitted, even obligated, to try to make them.

The judge may agree, but assault is assault. Real men face the consequences of their actions, be it a black eye or a 30-day suspended jail sentence and six months probation.